Eva Schloss, an Auschwitz survivor who dedicated her life to speaking out against prejudice and to preserving the legacy of her stepsister Anne Frank, died on Saturday at a care home in London. She was 96.
“We hope her legacy will continue to inspire through the books, films and resources she leaves behind,” Ms. Schloss’s family said in a statement published by the Anne Frank Trust UK, an organization she co-founded to challenge intolerance and educate young people about the Holocaust. After World War II, her mother married Anne Frank’s father, Otto, the sole survivor of the Frank family.
For more than 40 years, Ms. Schloss remained silent about the horrors she endured at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp to which she had been deported as a teenager. When her grandchildren once asked about the tattoo on her arm that she had been branded with at Auschwitz, A-5272, she told them it was her telephone number, she wrote in a memoir, “After Auschwitz.”
It was not until 1986, when she was invited to speak at the opening of a traveling Anne Frank exhibition in London, that she began to tell her story publicly. From that point on, and into her 90s, she traveled widely to speak — particularly to young people in schools and prisons — about the dangers of injustice.
In 2019, when she heard about students at a California school who had been photographed giving a Nazi salute while standing in front of several dozen red cups arranged in the shape of a swastika, she decided to have a private meeting with them.
“I think they really didn’t think about the consequences, but I think they have learned a lesson for life,” Ms. Schloss, then 89, said at the time. She had been on a tour of the United States speaking out against prejudice.
King Charles III, in a statement on social media on Sunday, wrote that the horrors that Ms. Schloss endured as a young woman were “impossible to comprehend, and yet she devoted the rest of her life to overcoming hatred and prejudice, promoting kindness, courage, understanding and resilience through her tireless work for the Anne Frank Trust UK and for Holocaust education across the world.”
Eva Geiringer was born in Vienna on May 11, 1929, to Jewish parents. Her father, Erich, a shoe manufacturer, had married Elfriede Markovits, known as Fritzi, in 1923.
Ms. Schloss recalled in her memoir the night of the German annexation of Austria in 1938, when Nazi troops rode into Vienna. She remembered how German soldiers were welcomed into the city with ringing church bells and cheering crowds, while flags with red swastikas were unfurled from buildings.
The family fled to Brussels and then to Amsterdam, where they became neighbors of the Franks. Ms. Schloss and Anne Frank, who were the same age, became friends, Ms. Schloss wrote in her memoir.
The Geiringer family was forced into hiding in 1942, on the same day as the Franks. Anne Frank kept a diary, where she wrote short stories and recorded her personal reflections, to pass the time while hiding in a secret annex in an Amsterdam house for 25 months.
The Frank family was ultimately discovered in 1944 and deported to Auschwitz in packed cattle wagons. Anne and her older sister, Margot, were then removed to Bergen-Belsen, where they died in February 1945. Otto Frank published Anne’s diary after he returned to Amsterdam, and it has been translated into about 70 languages, according to the Anne Frank House, an Amsterdam museum and educational organization.
Ms. Schloss’s family also evaded capture for about two years, until May 11, 1944 — Ms. Schloss’s 15th birthday. The Gestapo stormed into the home after a Dutch nurse pretending to help the family had reported them. The Geiringers, too, were sent to Auschwitz.
Ms. Schloss and her mother were freed by Soviet forces in 1945. Ms. Schloss soon found out that her father, Erich Geiringer, had been killed on May 4, 1945, days before the Nazis surrendered, and that her older brother, Heinz, had been killed the month before that, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In an interview with the Jewish magazine Lilith, Ms. Schloss said that her brother, on the deportation train to Auschwitz, had told her about paintings he had made while in hiding and how he had hidden then under floorboards. Ms. Schloss recovered the paintings after the war and donated them to the Dutch Resistance Museum.
Ms. Schloss’s second book, “The Promise” — one of three she wrote about the Holocaust — was about her brother. “Nobody knows about his life, what he has achieved in his short life,” she told Lilith. “So I realized I’d write a book about him, so that he is remembered.”
After the war, Ms. Schloss studied art history at the University of Amsterdam before moving to London, where she studied photography, on her way to becoming a professional photographer. She married Zvi Schloss, an Israeli economics student, in 1952. A year later, her mother, Fritzi, married Otto Frank. The two were bonded by their grief. Otto gave Ms. Schloss the Leica camera that he had used to photograph Anne and Margot.
Her survivors include her daughters Jacky, Caroline and Sylvia, as well as five grandchildren and a number of great-grandchildren.
After her release from Auschwitz, Ms. Schloss became an atheist, telling Lilith: “If our God is powerful and a ‘good’ God, how could he tolerate that? So, I also didn’t believe in humanity. I was rudderless and I was very, very, very miserable.”
But Otto Frank was not bitter, she said, adding that she learned from him. “He would say, ‘Hate won’t take you anywhere,’” she recalled. “I eventually experienced that this was true, and that’s what I’m trying to do — to see the good in people. You will find kind and amazing people.”
Jenny Gross is a reporter for The Times covering breaking news and other topics.
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